Hello Academic Affairs friends and colleagues,
As I hope you’ve heard, either through this InfoHub article or via the email requesting survey participation, we are in the process of gathering input on updating and renaming our Areas of Study.
A Brief History of Areas of Study
When we launched our Pathways work in 2016 and 2017, we grouped programs of study together into what we called Areas of Study (AoS). The idea was to provide “doorways” to students to help them find their interests and career or transfer pathways. However, “area of study” is not a common term in higher education, where you typically hear about “colleges” or “schools” or “divisions” as groups of programs.
To further complicate things, our instructional dean areas don’t always match up with our Areas of Study. For instance, we have the AoS of “Arts, Digital Media, and Communications” while we have the dean area of Arts & Digital Media; Communications is under the Dean of Liberal Arts, Humanities & Communications. We also have one dean over two areas of study in some instances, and we have one area of study divided across two deans.
Simplicity and Currency
Our goal with this renaming project is to focus on the dean areas as the “doorway” for students so that our groupings of programs line up with our organizational structure AND reflect current program offerings and pathways. We want to eradicate the complexity that I briefly described above. We also want to ensure that our naming conventions reflect current opportunities for career and transfer pathways. We will no longer refer to areas of study at all, so we are asking for input on three things.
First, what should we call our groupings of programs under a dean? If it’s no longer an Area of Study, should it be called a School? a Division? Something else? Second, we want your input on some updates to the names of some of our dean areas. Third, we would like your input on what to call our Associate Vice Chancellor (AVC) domains. Currently, our instructional programs are grouped under three AVCs: Academic Programs; Health Sciences; Workforce Education.
Your input – along with input from students and staff across the college – will help us update, simplify, and clarify how our instructional programs are organized. The goal is to help everyone – we want to help current and future students find their chosen pathway, we want to help our advisors in their important guidance work, we want to help everyone at ACC find the right instructional leader when they have a problem, and we want to show by our naming conventions that we are offering learning opportunities that will meet the needs of our community now and in the future.
Call to Action
Please take a few minutes to offer your opinions via this brief survey. The survey is open through February 20, and your input matters.
Thanks!
Gaye Lynn
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